2016

Medstone was founded by Andries Kevenaar in 2016. After graduating from Utrecht University, Andries began his career working as a pharmacist, before moving to international positions in big pharma. This is where he realized he wanted, and needed, to go back to the basics – back to being a pharmaceutical expert. And so Medstone was born: a company focused on providing independent medicine information.

At that time, the Medstone office was located in a small former garage in the famous neighborhood De Pijp in Amsterdam. The establishment of Medstone went hand in hand with the acquisition of the pharmaceutical wholesaler Fresco Farma, to be able to support pharmacists in purchasing medicines. Of course, Fresco Farma meets all strict European regulations that apply to the storage and distribution of medicines and medical devices.

2018

In 2018 we left our tiny garage and traded it in for a beautiful new office overviewing Amsterdam.

The same year we reached a milestone: 200 pharmacists had already joined the Medstone community to use purchasing benefits and medicine analyzes! To make sure that we were seen by not only pharmacists, but pharmacy students as well, we organized our very first networking event. We invited students to the A’dam Tower in Amsterdam to get to know Medstone.

Around the same time, we also came up with the idea of our ‘Medstone Algorithm’. This was going to be an algorithm that would make complex medical scientific data analysis a lot easier and quicker. The algorithm’s goal would be to aid pharmacists and other healthcare professionals in their daily work, by making it easier to stay up to date with the latest medical scientific developments. We started to develop the algorithm right away!

2019

Our research associates and data scientists spent countless hours training the algorithm. Thanks to this training, in 2019 the algorithm reached an accuracy score (F1) of 93%! This score indicates how well the algorithm can predict the contents of medical scientific articles. We are proud of this achievement, and until today we keep training the algorithm to maintain and even improve this so-called F1-score.

In addition to being in the office, since 2016 we have also regularly attended conferences and symposia. On these occasions we are happy to tell and enthuse healthcare professionals, students and other interested parties about Medstone and our algorithm model.

2020

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Medstone`s pharmaceutical wholesaler Fresco Farma supplied personal protective equipment as well as antigen rapid tests to a variety of government agencies, healthcare institutions, pharmacies and companies.

To take advantage of the offered purchasing benefits as well as the drug analyses, by the end of this year the Medstone pharmacist community counted over 400 active participants!

2021

In 2021, we celebrated Medstone’s 5-year anniversary! An event for pharmacists in the Planetarium in Amsterdam was organized, where we looked back at what has been achieved since Medstone`s foundation, and we listened to interesting talks about the future of pharmacists.

In those five years, the Medstone team had grown. We outgrew our Amsterdam office and relocated to a brand-new building in Almere (10 mins. drive from Amsterdam). In this new building, we have room for both our headquarters offices and our wholesale, all in one location!

The Science team was able to bring the algorithm to an even higher F1 score of 95%! The better this model gets at predicting, the better we and other researchers can use it for analysing medical scientific literature and conducting research.

We also announced the start of The Toxicity Atlas, a four-year PhD project in collaboration with university hospital Amsterdam UMC. In this project, medical researchers are looking for better treatment options for patients with brain cancer, actively making use of the algorithm.

2022

The algorithm we`ve been developing since the early days of Medstone has really taken shape. We finally gave it a name: SURUS! Named after a famous Carthaginian war elephant. SURUS helps medical professionals find their way in scientific literature. This allows researchers to analyze their literature quickly and insightfully using our search engine.

Moreover, the number of pharmaceutical and biotech companies assigning our SURUS Consultancy team to answer their healthcare questions is growing rapidly.

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